Surmado Brings Persona-Based AI Visibility to Local Businesses, Establishes Phoenix Headquarters

Scout shows how ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and other AI platforms represent a business to different customers, in different places, and in different languages.

Surmado, Inc. today announced persona-based AI visibility reports for local businesses as the company establishes its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.

About 10% of our leads last month said they found us through AI. That was zero six months ago. I never would’ve thought about AI visibility without Surmado. Now it’s part of how we market.”

— Zach Freeman, Founder, Veterans Moving America

Surmado helps small businesses see what AI says about them when customers ask for recommendations. Scout, Surmado’s AI research analyst, tests how a business appears across major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, and DeepSeek. The report shows whether AI recommends the business, ignores it, misunderstands it, or credits a competitor instead.

The problem is simple: AI does not give everyone the same answer.

A Phoenix restaurant may appear when an English-speaking visitor asks for dinner but disappear when a Spanish-speaking family asks the same question. A contractor may show up for one neighborhood but not another. A business can be known locally and still be missing from AI-generated recommendations.
Surmado tests those differences across customer types, locations, platforms, and languages so local business owners can see what their actual customers are likely to see.

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“AI visibility should not be something only enterprise brands can afford,” said Luke Walton, Founder and CEO of Surmado. “A local restaurant, dentist, contractor, HVAC company, salon, or agency should be able to see how AI represents them across customer types and languages without buying a $50,000 platform or hiring a research team. That is the point of Surmado. We are bringing enterprise-grade AI visibility to Main Street — and helping them fix it.”

How Scout Tests It
Traditional search gives every customer roughly the same page of links. AI does not work that way. Answers shift based on language, location, intent, and phrasing. A business can look strong in one conversation and disappear in another.

For each AI Visibility report, Scout creates customer profiles based on the business, then asks questions across multiple AI platforms. The result is not one generic score. It is a map of how AI represents the business to different types of customers, capturing the gaps and turning them into priority actions. This is the foundation of Local GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): the local-market equivalent of SEO for the AI era.

Built for English and Spanish-Speaking Customers in Phoenix
Phoenix businesses serve more than one kind of customer. AI may describe a business clearly in English and fail to recommend it in Spanish. It may understand the category but recommend a competitor.

Surmado currently supports reports in seven languages. The Phoenix focus is practical: English and Spanish are both local discovery languages. If AI only sees the English version of a business, it is missing part of the market.

Early Results
Surmado is already working with small businesses across the country. El Tianguis, a gluten-free Mexican restaurant in San Diego, went from 0% to 67% AI visibility after running Scout. The restaurant now ranks first in its category across AI platforms. Before Scout, the restaurant’s target customers, families managing celiac disease, could not find it on any AI platform.

Veterans Moving America, a veteran-owned moving company in Fort Worth, TX, has seen a similar shift. “About 10% of our leads last month said they found us through AI. That was zero six months ago,” said Zach Freeman, Founder of Veterans Moving America. “I never would’ve thought about AI visibility without Surmado. Now it’s part of how we market.”

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